2010 in books: What I read

Definitely not going to finish The American Language (HL Mencken) or The Metropolis Case (Matthew Gallaway) before midnight, so here, with little comment, and in no particular order, are the books that fed my brain between January and December (favorites bolded):

1. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
2. Sacred Games, Vikram Chanda
3. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
4. Lush Life, Richard Price
5. Sunset Park, Paul Auster
6. The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
7. Like Life, Lorrie Moore
8. Lit, Mary Karr
9. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
10. Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
11. Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker
12. Rumpus Women, compilation
13. C, Tom McCarthy
14. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
15. My Dog Tulip, JR Ackerley
16. Make Believe, Joanna Scott
17. The Manikin, Joanna Scott
18. The Black Minutes, Martin Solares
19. Half Life, Shelley Jackson
20. The Places in Between, Rory Stewart
21. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
22. A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
23. Lowboy, John Wray
24. You Are Here, Meenakshi Madhavan
25. The White Mary, Kira Salak
26. Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk
27. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron
28. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
29. Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk
30. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
31. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
32. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
33. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
34. The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson
35. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
36. Room, Emma Donoghue
37. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, Thomas Mullen
38. Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs
39. A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
40. Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane
41. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
42. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
43. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermansky
44. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender
45. Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich
46. Ghosted, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
47. Kapitoil, Teddy Wayne
48. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
49. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
50. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
51. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
52. The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller
53. The Vagrants, Yiyun Li
54. Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid
55. The Territory of Men, Joelle Fraser
56. Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
57. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
58. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
59. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
60. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
61. War, Sebastian Junger
62. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
63. The Ask, Sam Lipsyte
64. Little Bee, Chris Cleave

Hey, cool -- that's more than a book a week! Maybe next year, I'll make it an even 100. Not sure what to take away from this; apparently, I like women writers, I like fiction more than nonfiction, and I skew toward white American writers?

Anyone want to borrow a book? Lemme know. The lending library is open in Astoria. Also, my beloved book club has more or less disbanded. New year, new group?

Make Believe, Joanna Scott

Preemptive New Year's resolution: chronicle all the books I read (perfect for the obsessive in me!). So here are a few (meager, disjointed) thoughts on the piece of fiction I just finished.

Have you heard of Joanna Scott? I hadn't until I came across a trove of her books in my favorite used bookstore (Seaburn, on Broadway in Astoria); I picked up The Manikin and Make Believe because, well, she was blurbed by Michael Cunningham and Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace ("the absolute cream of our generation"), and someone at the NYTBR held, "We haven't heard a voice like hers since Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses." Endorsements like those are hard to deny.

I read The Manikin almost in one sitting; I could not put it down, and it was easily one of the best books I've read this year. (Forthcoming: a list of my favorites? Hrmmm ...) A splash of the gothic, a story about what it means to be a young woman growing up -- there were a lot of themes for me to grab onto. I'll probably need to reread it, because I consumed it so greedily and in such a fever I can hardly cite what it is that impressed me so much.

The cover copy on Make Believe made clear that the book covered very different ground, so it's not surprising that I was not as entranced. Still good, but I've read a lot more books about the intricacies of the American family than I have about creepy old houses stuffed with taxidermy projects. Make Believe is ... well, I suppose you could say it's a story of two families who suffered a common tragedy, and it explores the very different ways that the two groups of people made lives out of the wreckage. This makes it sound a bit like a Lifetime movie, or one of those terrible after-school specials so popular during my formulative years, but it is much, much more than that; it is flashbacks, and shifting narratives, and layers of chaos that are as hard to untangle as the threads that hold together the fabric of any family.

At the end of the book, Scott writes:

As for the cold, well after the first shock you just stop feeling it, you stop feeling any discomfort, instead you’re treated to the very simple certainty that you should be exactly what you are, even as you’re changing.

2010 has been a bit of a shock for me. I am still out in the cold. My fingers are numb, but I think I know better now who I am and where I want to go.